Dang it (said the Texas Baptist preacher’s kid), I really hate it when GetReligion gets to a serious media topic Just. A. Bit. Too. Early.

What am I talking about?

Well, take a look at the New York Times headline featured in the tweet at the top of this post, a tweet authored by a symbolic figure in the wider world of Democratic Party life. Michael Wear is a political consultant, but he is best known as the faith-outreach director for Barack Obama's 2012 campaign and then as part of Obama's White House staff. Here’s that headline:

Republicans Seize on Schools as a Wedge Issue to Unite the Party

Rallying around what it calls “parental rights,” the party is pushing to build on its victories this week by stoking white resentment and tapping into broader anger at the education system.

First of all, I think the verb “seize” is a stand-in for the world “pounce,” which has become a bit of a cliche in recent years. Here is the Urban Dictionary take on the “Republicans pounce!” phenomenon or click here for a National Review essay on the subject. The whole point is that the issue at hand isn’t really all that important, but conservatives have “pounced” on it and are using this alleged issue to hurt liberals in social media, conservative news sources, etc.

Major media on the coasts, of course, avoid covering the topic — unless it leads to an embarrassing defeats for Democrats in a symbolic state like Virginia.

Anyway, the Times headline may ring a bell or two for those who read this October 22 podcast-post here at GetReligion: “Are 'parental rights' references (inside scare quotes) the new 'religious liberty.” Here is the opening of that post:

Here’s a question that I heard recently from a young person down here in Bible Belt country: Why do students at (insert public school) need permission forms from their parents and a doctor to take (insert over-the-counter medication), but the school can assist a student’s efforts to change her gender identity while keeping that a total secret from the parents?

Obviously, something had changed at this school. The crucial question was whether parents had any right to shape or attempt to influence the education — or the moral and physical transformation — of their child in this setting controlled by the state and funded by their tax dollars. Yes, there are religious doctrines involved in many or even most of these cases.

Here’s the question we discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast: Are media reports about this issue starting to turn parental rights into “parental rights,” complete with those prickly “scare quotes” that have turned references to old-school religious liberty issues into so-called “religious liberty” issues. Click here to listen to that podcast.

I wrote that post as a journalism guy who is worried about journalism issues (and, yes, as a former Democrat who is now a third-party voter). I was reacting to this pre-Election Day story and headline at (Where else?) the New York Times:

The Unlikely Issue Shaping the Virginia Governor’s Race: Schools

Virginia Republicans in a tight governor’s race have been staging “Parents Matter” rallies and tapping into conservative anger over mandates and critical race theory.

Wear, obviously, was writing as a Democrat to other Democrats on Twitter when he stated the issue this way:

Listen ... this approach -- "parental rights" in scare quotes, treating this as a purely partisan "move" -- it's wrong substantively, but it's also just not a winner politically. Folks need to get out of their echo chambers on this one and fast.

That’s interesting, in term of the current mood in American politics. My journalism point here at GetReligion remains the same. This scare-quotes approach to “parental rights” clearly echoes the now well-established media trend toward framing religious liberty — a perfectly normal First Amendment term, once beloved by the old-school left — inside the same kind of “scare quotes.”

It’s bad journalism. It suggests that cultural conservatives are “pouncing” on this topic and making false claims about the subject at hand — as opposed to stating their beliefs, often backed with arguments from legal think tanks with lawyers that argue about these issues at the U.S. Supreme Court. If you have followed church-state debates for 40-plus years, as I have, you know that there are liberal voices on these hot-button issues and conservative voices, as well.

The bottom line: Someone like Robert P. George of Princeton University does not “pounce” on issues such as these. He has been studying them and writing about them for decades.

What is the key material in this latest Times political-desk news story (as opposed to an analysis piece)? Here is the thesis statement, right up top:

Seizing on education as a newly potent wedge issue, Republicans have moved to galvanize crucial groups of voters around what the party calls “parental rights” issues in public schools, a hodgepodge of conservative causes ranging from eradicating mask mandates to demanding changes to the way children are taught about racism.

Yet it is the free-floating sense of rage from parents, many of whom felt abandoned by the government during the worst months of the pandemic, that arose from the off-year elections as one of the most powerful drivers for Republican candidates.

All of this activity, from the point of view seen in the Times, boils down to arguments about race:

The message worked on two frequencies. Pushing a mantra of greater parental control, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, stoked the resentment and fear of some white voters, who were alarmed by efforts to teach a more critical history of racism in America. He attacked critical race theory, a graduate school framework that has become a loose shorthand for a contentious debate on how to address race.

There were, of course, other issues lurking in the background — some of which could be linked to religious, moral and cultural differences among voters. This is all the Times had to say about that:

While the conservative news media and Republican candidates stirred the stew of anxieties and racial resentments that animate the party’s base — thundering about equity initiatives, books with sexual content and transgender students on sports teams — they largely avoided offering specific plans to tackle thornier issues like budget cuts and deepening educational inequalities.

Way down in this long feature, there was a quote that struck me as both scary, prophetic and a bit tone deaf. Yes, I also sensed “religion ghosts” hovering in the background.

Thus, we will end with this:

Geoff Garin, a top Democratic pollster, said the party’s candidates needed to expand their message beyond their long-running policy goals like reducing class sizes and expanding pre-K education.

“It’s going to be incumbent on Democrats to have a compelling response,” said Mr. Garin, who worked as a pollster for Mr. McAuliffe during his 2013 campaign for governor. “They also need to be prepared to assert the value of public education in terms of a place where there’s a common curriculum and common set of values that most voters agree are the right ones for public schools.”

Ah, there’s the issue that could drive future coverage. What, precisely, is the “common set of values” that unites Americans at this moment in time on religious, moral and cultural issues?

Long ago, when I was doing a Baylor University graduate degree in Church-State Studies, it was safe to say that most voters — especially in flyover country and the Bible Belt — would settle for a kind of quiet, milquetoast Protestantism in public-school classrooms. That wasn’t fair to atheists, Catholics and lots of other people and this approach led to punishments for young people (like me) who refused to offer lowest-common-denominator prayers over school public address systems at the start of each day.

But Christmas was still the shopping-mall version of Christmas. The sex-education classes avoided hot-button topics and didn’t send students home asking questions that freaked out lots of parents. In terms of race, we talked a lot about racial equality and the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was shot down when I was in Middle School. We didn’t talk — in classrooms — that much about the obvious racial divides in our city.

I will ask, once again: Is there a “common set of values” that unites Americans at this point? What unites people who watch the Fox News talking heads at night and those who prefer the talking heads on CNN, MSNBC, PBS or NPR? What unites old-school First Amendment liberals and the new illiberals who are much more concerned about hate speech, pronouns and violent trigger words?

That’s a question that points to a big news story that isn’t going away. It will help if journalists show some respect for parents on both sides of these debates. In other words, skip the “scare quotes.”

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